Private nsswitch or nscd per process

Question

I want a short term fix for some NIS performance problems on my network.

I don't have root access, and nscd has all caching turned off.

I'd like to provide local nscd-like capability to allow getpwuid to cache its results, avoiding many expensive NIS lookups (sometimes 5-10 seconds each)

context:

R calls getpwuid lots during package loading.

Answer 1

I don't know of an easy or elegant way to do this. One option would be to implement your own getpwuid function and provide it to R using LD_PRELOAD, but you'll probably be better off just getting someone to fix NIS.